Did you notice it? Where you aware it had even taken place? What were you doing when the world finally fell completely through the Looking Glass and we all ended up groping around Wonderland as reality melted round our ankles like pyjama trousers?
Because that’s what’s happened. I’m sure you’ve read various writers and commentators over the years peddling their default ‘you couldn’t make it up!’ stance when something odd happens (prime culprit: Richard Littlejohn bemoaning such acts of terrifying modern lunacy as people being gay or black people having the vote) but if the past few weeks the planet officially went, for want of a better word, wonky.
Let’s review. Television in recent weeks has presented us Heston Blumenthal serving a dessert made of absinthe and dildos to a dinner party featuring former BBC Iraqui correspondent Rageh Omar and this was merely a side dish to the sullying taste of sour scandal eminating from, of all places, ‘University Challenge’. Meanwhile, the most dangerous and therefore rock’n'roll job for anyone to have is now as a Sri Lankan international cricketer; a comic deemed ‘unfilmable’ has been filmed into a film; global warming has lead to the coldest winter in 13 years; this year’s Best Director Oscar has been shown off at a working man’s club in Bury and the new kings of political agit-rock are apparently Oasis who’ve been banned from playing in China because Noel Gallagher once played at a Free Tibet concert and Liam’s new hairstyle is based on ‘Hong-Kong Phooey’.
Mind you, most of you may not have noticed any of this happened as these stories need more than 140 characters to be explained in detail and therefore won’t have made it onto ‘Twitter’- which you probably all know by now is a mind-bending innovation in which, after a couple million years of learning to speak to each other in complex setences embracing a breadth of tones and inflections, mankind has decided that the next logical step is to boil communication down to an un-nuanced string of text which is shorter than the real name for Bangkok (which runs to 155 characters, so at least it could be just about squeezed into the average SMS text message).
In short, the world- as usual- is currently confusing the hell out of me. Normally, I’d put this down to humanity’s unlimited capacity for absurdity (the sort of thing so expertly skewered by Stewart Lee- watch his Comedy Vehicle this week on BBC 2. Seriously. That’s an order) but now it seems I can actually ascribe my bafflement at existence to old age. And this isn’t some late-20s existencialist rage at the slow dying of the light as my glorious late-teen years fade into the distance. This is down to actual, genuine, proper old age.
Because it starts at 27.
An American scientist (isn’t it always) has discovered that mental agility starts to decline noticably from the age of 27- therefore heralding the onset of old age. Brain speed, reasoning, puzzle-solving, memory; all start hitting the skids at this particular age. No wonder Hendrix, Cobain, Morrisson, Joplin et al all kicked the bucket during within 12 months of their twenty-seventh birthday. I’ve written previously of my owrry that I’d never make it to 28 owing to my obssession with this strangest of rock ‘n’ roll phenomena but now it seems my real concern should have been getting through to my next birthday and still remembering how to tie my shoe-laces.
My new job currently sees me dispensing study-skills coaching to a variety of perky, enthusiastic and terrifyingly young University students when what I clearly should be doing is getting them to teach me how to program a VCR while I regale them with stories about when the internet was all fields.
To asuage both my worries about the world going mad and me becoming an elderly gibbering vegetable I’ve decided to listen to music by a man who most certainly didn’t pop his clogs at 27 and never seems to have gone in for the kind of absurd behaviour which is usually perpetrated by massive rock stars before it filters down to the rest of humanity.
Bruce Springsteen, and this is a fact, is as old as America. His recording career started just after he signed the Decleration of Independence and he only failed to become the first President of the United States after missing the election due to selling out 437 consecutive nights at Madison Square Garden. Absolutely every single one of his recorded output of 4 billion songs is about a) girls, b) cars, c) girls and cars or d) Vietnam and there are people who genuinely believe he finishes playing to 80,000 people a night around the world for 10 months and then goes home and back to his job running a hardware store. He is so earnest he sings everything with his eyes shut with a look on his face like he’s defacating gravel and most of his songs have outros that are longer than most people’s careers. And in ‘Ain’t Got You’ he wrote the ultimate ‘being-a-rock-star-is-rubbish-I-don’t-care-what-you-think-cause-I’ve-got-lady-trouble’ song. He’s so utterly plain, in fact, that he’s beaten to the title of New Jersey’s Most Exotic Rock Star by Jon Bon Frigging Jovi.
He is, in short, the Anti-Prince. And I’ve started to absolutely love him.
Told you the world had gone mad.